skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's only a paradox if you think the universe is infinite in size and age, and the stars are evenly distributed and have been shining the whole time.

Basically, the fact that the sky is dark tells us that at least one of the above assumptions is wrong.
> I especially find interesting the proposal to use R&D for the pharmaceutical industry from the Government. I just don't know how practical that is. It would need serious commitment and serious investment from Governments to do that.

You're quite right in this analysis - especially with your followup about this being the most applicable where healthcare is also paid by the government.

In Europe, 83% of the pharma revenue - on average - comes from taxpayer money, mostly through drug subsidies. Yet, only 15% of their revenue total is used for R&D (and another 30% of the total is used for manufacturing), according to the pharma industry's own numbers.

So if we pay all of those 30 percent units for manufacturing from the tax coffers, another 15 percent units is needed to bring research on par. That takes us to 45 percent units - but we're paying for 83 percent units today. We can afford to double the research and still save a significant chunk of taxpayer money.

This doesn't even begin to take into account that 70% of today's new pharmaceuticals are so-called copycat drugs with no other purpose than to circumvent another company's patent monopoly. If we assume that these resources will be spent researching new drugs instead, as nothing is patent-encumbered, we have tripled the research just in forcing drugs to be generic, before taking actual increases or decreases in research funds into account.

The loser here is the pharma industry's "marketing" account, which has been overly well-fed with taxpayer money.

Cheers,
Rick
True, there are options, I guess I was just referring to straight python threads and interpreter calls, not what you can do with extensions.

For heavy math workloads, which was what I was thinking of, you can use the techniques you linked to there to great effect. It is something that you need to put a little more thought into than you might in a non-locked situation like pthreads in C though.
It's not usually noted, but Olber's paradox relies on a false assumption. The argument goes that the night sky is dark and therefore the universe must be finite in extent or duration or both. But the night sky isn't really dark. Olber was just looking at the wrong wavelength. If you look in microwave wavelengths, of course, you see the CMB. The fact that the CMB is out in microwave wavelengths rather than being somewhere where Olber could see it is strong evidence for an expanding universe.
Well, there you go. Just different assumptions and experiences.

I believe that you're still better off just eating the orange rather than drinking the juice. But I don't doubt that what you see as proper juice is way better than the stuff you find in stores.
Forget the free coffee, where’s my $10 000?
TBH, I think the appeal to "economic growth" is often the wrong argument and instead there should be a focus on maximizing benefit for the public and the individual.

Having lots of patents and stuff produces economic growth and jobs, just not for inventors, creators, manufacturers, distributors, retailers and salespeople. Instead it creates economic growth for lawyers, para-legals, judges, courts and patent trolls.

Recently it was reported that Apple and Google both spend more on intellectual property related activities than on research and development, and they spend a lot on research and development. This shows that there is economic growth, but it is not desirable economic growth the same way a disaster like Hurricane Katrina or Hurricane Andrew created after they destroy entire regions and contributed to those economies via recovery activities.

Instead the argument needs to focus on growth that is maximally beneficial for society at large. IP strong and IP weak regimes both produce economic growth, but in different vectors, but only a weak IP regime produces an economic environment where the availability and quality of the goods and services available improves while the price drops of those same goods and services drops. That is maximally beneficial.
Exactly. It's a reminder that Kickstarter does curate, and that nothing beats email. Getting featured in Kickstarter's weekly newsletter is probably the biggest boost, and then they'll feature you on the front page and/or category pages.
I didn't think of that when I first wrote the thing. Only after I activated it did I have a reader point out that it would cause people with short comments to have to wait to reply, talking about it as a bad thing. My immediate reaction was, this is great!
Sure, but you might as well just automate it by shipping browsers that run their code inside the proper sandbox, rather than reinventing the browser.
I thought sco owned hello world http://uw714doc.sco.com/en/SDK_cprog/_Basic_cc_and_CC_Comman...
Viajar no Rio Yukon - Canadá
There were no flights to Mir that "slammed into the station". The collision on Mir was due to an accident during testing of a new manual docking system for the Progress spacecraft. However, prior to the test the Progress had already successfully docked with the station, the test involved undocking and then switching to a new docking system for the test.
I googled a little, and apparently the radiocommunication satellites are regulated by ITU: http://www.itu.int/en/about/Pages/whatwedo.aspx .
How does distance affect brightness? Distant stars are exactly as bright as close stars - however, the "brightness" is just spread over a greater area of space.

In particular, the perceived brightness of a star falls off according to the square of distance - you can work this out for yourself by comparing the surface area of a sphere of radius d, with the surface area of a sphere of radius 2d.

But how many stars are at that distance? If you assume uniform density, then the answer is exactly the opposite of what we found above! The number of stars at a distance of d is proportional to the square of the distance.

This means that the total amount of light perceived from stars at a distance d is exactly the same, irrespective of the value of d.

Then if the universe was also both eternal and infinite, then there would be an infinite amount of light reaching the earth!
If performance means any act, in the meaning of 'action' and not just 'to act in a perfomance', then the word performance loses the meaning of a perfomance and we would no longer be able to distinguish performances from any act and so the whole idea of being able to licence them would become rather problematic.
There is actually a much better explanation than this. When you look at the nights sky you see a snapshot of the universe. The further back you look the more stuff there is, but while there more objects there proportionally dimmer.

Now, in an unaging and infinite universe with random stars everywhere you would get what amounts to unlimited light. But, our universe is finite and does age, so you get a finite amount of light from that fixed volume. As to how much light you end up seeing it's a function of:

A) Being close to our Galaxy the Milky Way with a large clump of stars inside it.

B) The average of all the galaxy's in the observable universe which relates to the average amount of matter in the universe which is not that high.

Thus, a fairly dim sky outside of the disk that is the milky way.
That is what many Westerners, especially those here on HN, miss. Meditation is expressly a religious/spiritual tool.

It's a technology of the sacred in the same way that visionary plants and chemicals are. In fact visionary plants can be a very effective preview/shortcut of the end goals a meditator wishes to reach.The point of meditation is to quiet the mind so that one can know God*

*Where here "God" means an experiential state of nondual, atemporal awareness radically different from our normal states of waking and dreaming.
"The universal speed-up is rewriting small bits of code in C" - pretty much sums up the subject of Python performance. Even in Cython you have a Python dialect that's translated to C.
Very good point. It's telling. Screw the company, they say, we're going to inflate this thing, take our profits, and go to the next con.

In this new world we're watching unfold, boards no longer do what is in the interest of the company. This guy puts it well:

2)"Companies should not be run in the interest of their owners." Shareholders are the most mobile of corporate stakeholders, often holding ownership for but a fraction of a second (high-frequency trading represents 70% of today's trading). Shareholders prefer corporate strategies that maximize short-term profits and dividends, usually at the cost of long-term investments. (This often also includes added leverage and risk, and reliance on socializing risk via 'too big to fail' status, and relying on 'the Greenspan put.') Chang adds that corporate limited liability, while a boon to capital accumulation and technological progress, when combined with professional managers instead of entrepreneurs owning a large chunk (eg. Ford, Edison, Carnegie) and public shares with smaller voting rights (typically limited to 10%), allows professional managers to maximize their own prestige via sales growth and prestige projects instead of maximizing profits. Another negative long-term outcome driven by shareholders is increased share buybacks (less than 5% of profits until the early 1980s, 90% in 2007, and 280% in 2008) - one economist estimates that had GM not spent $20.4 billion on buybacks between 1986 and 2002 it could have prevented its 2009 bankruptcy. Short-term stockholder perspectives have also brought large-scale layoffs from off-shoring. Governments of other countries encourage longer-term thinking by holding large shares in key enterprises (China Mobile, Renault, Volkswagen), providing greater worker representation (Germany's supervisory boards), and cross-shareholding among friendly companies (Japan's Toyota and its suppliers).

source - http://www.amazon.com/Things-They-Dont-About-Capitalism/dp/1...
A different take on sexism in IT
I think your experience is pretty typical. I had the same. I took what was technically considered a college-level physics course in high school, and we never really delved into astronomy. Only in college itself did the subject start to come up, and that's because I selected those classes.

I suspect this is because the US high school education system has a fairly standardized, one-size-fits-all curriculum. There are some allowances and exceptions, of course. But, for the most part, everyone is going to be covering roughly the same material. And astronomy isn't deemed as necessary, for the beginner, as some other rudiments of physics. College, on the other hand, offers more opportunity for individual choice in one's curriculum.
Sweden tells Greece to quit eurozone
In remarks that will send Brussels, Berlin and Athens wild, Sweden says Greece should quit the euro to boost its economy
Most obvious telltale that todo is too simplistic is that the jquery version is shorter than many of the framework versions.
Calling "Cause and Effect Fallacy" on some slides without having proof at hand is just as fallacious. Both are opinion pieces. Please don't give something a "scientific spin" if you are just stating yet another opinion with anecdotal evidence at best.

There should be another fallacy name for exactly what this article does.
Vinod Khosla, disruptive innovation, and the future of healthcare
That's on an intergalactic scale. Theres no evidence that I know of that galaxies or galactic clusters will be torn apart from cosmic expansion.
If BSD is an OS then I don't think OSX is a flavour of BSD...

I don't disagree with any of what you're saying there, I just think it's a very grey area where you have multiple kernels and userlands, some of which are fairly easily interchangeable. And yes, most linux distro's are GNU/Linux (or at least something/linux) where Android/Linux is quite distinct.
I think you meant inet_aton() or inet_addr().

However, the value of looking at ping is it let's you see a simple example of a lot of networking system calls which you can then dig into. I had a class project to write a simple web-server and text based browser in C and ping was actually a great place to start.
Plane changes are one of the most expensive operations in an orbit iirc.
The unique characteristic is the growth.

Startups (successful startups) grow much faster than "normal" businesses.

Facebook, Groupon, Instagram, Pinterest, you name it.
PyPy doesn't support Python's C API. It's more of an exercise in tracing JIT compilation (and crowdfunding various experiments) rather than a CPython replacement.
By firmly planting his argument in emotion and polemical sloganeering ... and thereby showing the unworkability of this approach to discussion? (Pretty sophisticated!)
Check this live html/css/js code editor I'm working on: http://liveditor.com, it's written in Delphi, with a small part in JS. IMHO, Delphi is the best/productive native Dev tool for Windows, and it's my 'secret' weapon ;)
It's also the most obvious telltale that most of these frameworks are completely unnecessary for many front-end scenarios. I find a good portion of the front-end work I do does not benefit even from the more lightweight ones like Backbone in the least.
Prepare Your Startup Now for International Markets
Thanks for the link to Tom Preston-Werner's blog post about the founding of GitHub, it's a very good read.

He has another blog post, "Ten Lessons from GitHub’s First Year" [1]. Two of the ten points suggest that culture was important even in those early days:

> Have Fun... Fostering a playful and creative environment
> is critical to maintaining both your personal health,
> and the health (and idea output) of the company.
>
> Trust your Team... In a startup, you can drastically reduce
> momentum by applying micromanagement, or you can boost
> momentum by giving trust.

Although I agree completely with your point that "[i]t'd be hard to argue that the first few months of hacking was 'culture'"... It sure doesn't feel like they had to put a conscious effort into building a culture at this early stage, rather that their culture was already embodied in their personal beliefs, and the company now reflects those beliefs.

[1] http://tom.preston-werner.com/2011/03/29/ten-lessons-from-gi...
Using Encrypted Connections to Secure Data
It reminded me of the 'paradox' that 1 + 0.5 + 0.25 + 0.125... is finite and not even very large. You could have an infinite universe with infinitely many stars and still end up with a certain percentage of the sky being dark.

Or maybe I'm mathematically wrong, but the above summation has broken any intuition for me that "the sum of infinitely many things must certainly surpass everything" :(
To me, what makes CPython special is that it's a language interpreter that's incredibly easy to get into and hack due to its simplicity. Pypy, while probably a good standard for server use, will never have that quality to it. IMHO it would be a shame if python loses this aspect of the ecosystem.
Different people lear different ways of course, but for me what worked really well was reading about it, a lot, on the internet and trying out various things. At the same time I went to a local zen center that does mindful meditation. They have a short course on various techniques, and people who have been practicing for a long time - this is always good for me, I like to ask questions. The other nice thing about the zen center is that 2 days a week they had sitting meditation time. So you show up, and meditate in a big room with other people. Again, just personal preference, but being there, where the meditation was the focus, helped me not succumb to distraction (also, because I didn't want to be rude and be fidgety, noisy,or otherwise distracting to other poeple).

As for sincere effort, it isn't full time job style, but, it isn't "just" keeping a routine. It is keeping a routine, and actively trying to improve your meditation technique. Much like going golfing every week isn't the same as intentionally practicing your swing or putting with a coach every week.
That might not last as long as you think. Apparently Global Foundries thinks it can reach parity with FinFET 14 nm chips in 2014, which is Intel's (new) timeline as well. I think this is happening because of 2 reasons: Intel has experienced delays of a few months with every latest generation, and GloFo also found a shortcut to the 14nm process:

"By moving to 14nm finfet while keeping 20nm interconnect, GF has brought forward the introduction of its 14nm process by one year."

http://www.electronicsweekly.com/blogs/david-manners-semicon...
I have used bubble sort in a commercial program before: there are plenty of embedded microprocessors with a minimal libc that does not include qsort. For sorting a small list (5-20 items) bubble sort is a fine choice because it is dead simple to implement.
PyPKPass - Python PassKit Library
What specifically do we know about consciousness and life that's incompatible with this account? It's conventional to assume that living organisms are somehow the vessel of consciousness, but is that assumption strictly mandated by any particular empirical evidence? How would you propose even to frame such an idea as a rigorously testable hypothesis?
I cam here to see if any other internet "oldies" (we've dated ourselves) thought that as well.
The web's first meme?
Sorry, off topic but do you still use Cake? Porque?
This makes sense from my experience, decent papers that are rejected are rejected by reviewers, who themselves are doing related research and publishing papers. This means that they have been exposed to a larger group of people who would want to cite them later, writers, not readers.

If you review and reject a decent paper that needs improvements when you see the revised version published (or an un-revised version for that matter) you are likely to be drawn to read it again and it is likely to come to mind when you are later doing research that can use that information.
The Game Killer: beating 'unbeatable' casino games
I don't know how much experience you have with python.. but you don't need getters/setters in order to gain flexibility. You can always redefine how assignment/accessing works for any property later.
Boring interview questions, boring answers. Why do we bother?
Well Intel recently introduced its Xeon Phi co-processor, which according to them offers about the same performance as Nvidia's chips, while not needing to code in CUDA. But I never trust Intel's marketing anyway because they always seem to exaggerate in some way or be misleading on purpose, so we'll see how that goes. Plus, I'm interested to see what comes out of Nvidia's Project Denver or whatever they are calling it now (Nvidia's 64-bit custom ARMv8 SoC for HPC and servers, which should arrive in 2014).
Ask HN: Do Hackers favor a particular political ideology?  Why?
I don't see any strong correlation, liberal vs conservative, in my travels.

This fascinates me because, while emotions play into every decision, one would think that software developers apply analytical processes to a greater extent than the general population, and this might favor a particular party/ideology.

Maybe this is because there are just too many variables to apply objective decisions? Ultimately, it just becomes an emotional decision. Whether your empathy latches onto opposing abortion rights, or desiring universal health care. Whether your narrative for fiscal policy fits better with Keynes or Rand.

I've read George Lakoff and related works, and would love to find, or just approach, the formula to determine what makes people fall to the Left, the Right, or that increasingly small pool in the middle.

fwiw - I'm a developer and fell to the left.
Yes there is lookup, always lookup. Dynamic language, something in loop could change what lstr is.

Each "dot" incurs lookup. Your example reminds me of one idiom. Assigning nested.look.up to local var for access inside loop.
Last I've looked at it, it took quite a long time to compile compared to CPython (while say luajit is not taking that much longer to compile compared to reference lua).
Thoughts on The Magazine
By that argument there is basically nothing that qualifies as "commercial" file sharing because ultimately those bytes are moving for free whether it's P2P or a bootleg DVD transferring them to a DVD player.

Everyone benefits from patent reform, copyright reform, the cost of drugs being reduced, DRM being abolished etc. Why derail those arguments with "and legalize piracy!" when TPB etc's perhaps illicit business models are of no lasting consequence to anyone but the few whose pockets they line?
I had the same situation in college as well, though that could be because I went to a somewhat unusually set up science/math uni (hmc.edu), in which all majors had to take a science/math "common core". There were 3 required physics classes for non-physics majors, which were these, going pretty in-depth into physics but still not covering any astronomy: http://physics.hmc.edu/course/3/, http://physics.hmc.edu/course/46/, http://physics.hmc.edu/course/4/

Astrophysics is generally popular among students, but afaict it hasn't been included basically because the physicists consider the above three courses to be higher priority.
The difficulty is that anything more complex is TOO complex as an example. This is meant to demonstrate the MVC of a thing. With this example, I can quickly examine the structure and feel of a given tool, an hold the entire example in my head. When you start stacking all of the other bits on too, this starts to become more difficult. What TodoMVC allows is a quick survey to narrow down contenders. At that point I can examine the other crucial aspects and understand if they work for my project.
You need to make sure you do all your benchmarks in a function. In a funtion, local variables translate to indexes into a local variable array; outside of a function, they remain globals lookups.

Your first reply that "there's always a lookup" isn't right. Some variable accesses (specifically: local variable accesses) do simply map to array accesses.
Well Apple is certainly an interesting choice, and maybe if this happened like 2 years ago, they might've done it, too. However, I think they are too far along building their ARM SoC for Macs right now, and it would take them more than 2 years to put AMD's chips on the right track. Plus, if Apple bought them, would they even be allowed to keep them for themselves? Wouldn't that mean Intel would remain the only competitor in x86 for Windows devices?
> Well sure, but who writes their own sorting algorithms these days anyways?

This was (is still?) in the gnu flex program source:

/* We sort the states in sns so we
* can compare it to oldsns quickly.
* We use bubble because there probably
* aren't very many states.
*/
bubble (sns, numstates);

Whoever wrote this should know better. Their mistake of not using the language's built-in sorting functionality would at least be forgivable if they had used insertion sort, but maybe we should blame academic institutions for exposing programmers to bubble sort in the first place. Want to show newbie programmers the difference between an O(N^2) and O(N*logN) algorithm? Fine. Insertion sort is O(N^2) too, just like bubble sort, though there is no practical case where bubble sort out-performs insertion sort, and you certainly wouldn't use bubble sort to speed up quicksort.
Business Insider's new ad model is neither "crazy" nor "new"
Am I the only one that thinks their website is crap? Just from looking at the source I can tell they have crap frontend designers/developers... Look at the way they name their classes, and wtf is with all the inline js?

For a company like that, I would wonder why all of it isn't minimized/spaceless as well?

Oracle smoracle, soon rendered irrelevant thanks to emerging technologies.